Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SIXTY ONE – OUR HOUSING AND WORK (BEGINNING)
After the wedding we returned to Tbilisi. In addition to studying and teaching students, I had to find housing and find a job for my wife.
To begin with, we settled in a grandmother’s apartment in our yard. It was a modest small apartment, like Papa Geppetto’s one from Pinocchio, with the difference that there was no smell of any treasure, even painted on canvas, but rather the smell of dampness and poverty. Light came into the room from the gallery, the old furniture was deteriorating, while we began conversing the metal bed into scrap-metal before we even moved in.
In the mornings I ran out to classes, after which I hurried to private lessons, and then met with my wife, who was pining in prison. Lilya was afraid to walk around an unfamiliar city without me and without speaking Georgian. Thanks to her thick brown hair, people took her for a local and often addressed her in Georgian, considering her one of their own. But this, from my point of view, favorable situation practically paralyzed Lilya. Perhaps “old wounds” made themselves felt when the military father changed objects, and the children changed schools, where new classmates came up with new nicknames for them every year. It turns out that the girl’s name was Marina. So Marina Malinik. Wow! It’s like having English name Raspbera Raspberry. Cool? Or Kalinka Malinka, like in a popular song. In a word, it always started. She renamed herself into Lilya in order to at least slightly reduce this fruit-berry mixture of bullying.
There was nothing like this in Georgia. Nicknames were given rarely; little attention was paid to first and last names – there were more nationalities here and tolerance for differences was natural.
I must say that I did not immediately notice Lilya’s reclusiveness. She traveled and walked joyfully everywhere with me, but alone – she could not. But gradually this timidity passed, the ear got used to guttural speech, began to distinguish words and phrases, more and more acquaintances appeared around, in a word, life was coming out of the fog, like a decal under the fingers of a diligent student.
Lilya received Tbilisi registration. For those who don’t know what it is, I’ll explain.
A special, so-called passport regime, existed in the USSR. It was the way for the police spying on people. Officially none had the right to live for more than a month in a new place without a stamp in his or her passport. This stamp was called the registration. It gave permission to live at a given address in a given apartment and served as “a visa”. How do you like the visa regime for each apartment? Great?
But, let’s say, you didn’t go to the police, but lived as a guest. Firstly, it was only suitable for vacationers. Without registration no one could count on getting a job. I mean a decent work, and not one-time loading, unloading and cleaning. Secondly, you could get into trouble if someone complained about you, and each institution first checked your registration in your passport.
An American reader might say, “That’s a hell lot of control, but in the end, what’s the problem? Get a residence permit (registration) if it’s required by law!”
The problem was that the law required registration, but did not allow it! It was impossible to work without registration, but not everyone could obtain registration. The developed system of “protection” of people’s living conditions prohibited adding a guest, even a son or daughter, to the parents living in a given apartment. Therefore, you had to bribe everyone around you in order to collect the documents necessary to apply for registration, and then also to bribe officials in the police, so that they would slap that damned stamp on your passport.
To present the picture clearly, we must understand that people initially tried to follow the rules honestly, without any bribes. They, as it was named it, fought for the truth! And sometimes they managed to win (bribe takers were afraid to take money openly and be caught by witnesses). But cases dragged on and on. People would become tired, they needed to start working sooner, to feed their families, and it was simply disgusting to feel like a second-class citizen. Therefore, many preferred to find a shortcut using bribes. And the officials were just waiting for this.
The only “clean” and direct way to obtain registration was a marriage. One of the spouses was initially sign out at the police station of the place of his/her residence, and then the other spouse brought the marriage certificate and passports of both spouses to the police station of his place of residence and received the permission to register of the spouse in his/her apartment. The officials could have tinkered, hoping for at least some money to speed up the process, but a persistent person could easily do it without a bribe. Therefore, in the USSR, fictitious marriage existed and flourished, in the lion’s share only to resolve a vital issue – a registration.
This main question immediately arose after our marriage. Lilya was registered with her parents three miles outside of Moscow, that is, in the Moscow region. The father-in-law and the mother-in-law believed that their daughter should retain such a valuable, almost Moscow residence permit. But I never wanted to live in Moscow. I studied at the Tbilisi Medical Institute and prepared my students (“penguins”) to enter universities all over the country. Since childhood, my wife liked Tbilisi for its warm, human relations and friendliness, so without thinking twice, she checked out of her parents’ apartment and registered with me. That allowed her to get a job. It happened as follows.
My course mates usually asked me what my wife’s specialty was, and when they heard that she was an economist of the food industry, they congratulated me,
“They don’t count money, they measure it,” the children of wealthy parents asserted knowledgeably, showing with their fingers the thickness of the stacks of money.
It was very likely that they were telling the truth.
One day I went with Lilya for an interview at some food organization. Of course, the meeting was arranged because of some sort of connections. The director of a Food Enterprise really wanted to hire a Moscow specialist. But when he saw the young woman, he gave up.
“I’ll tell you right away, a monthly salary…” and he showed with his fingers the thickness of the wad of money, “Products are free, whatever you want. Security is guaranteed – what kind of crazy man would pester a woman who keeps all his fake invoices? But if you don’t protect us from the Moscow audit, we’ll all go to jail for at least ten years. Therefore, I need assurances that such work is up to you. Girl, can you defend us?”
Lilya’s frightened eyes were his answer.
“Okay, I understand everything. You need a job not on the front line, but in the rear, where they write smart articles about the economy, but they have no idea how to make money and from what. Contact…” and he wrote the woman’s name and phone number on a piece of paper.
Lilya soon began working in her department, at the Research Institute of Economics.
After this, it became much easier for her to adapt to an unfamiliar life. Whether you want it or not, you had to leave the house, travel by public transport and learn the basics of the language, at least to say in a minibus,
“Stop here (აქ გააჩერეთ – ak gaacheret) or stop at the corner (კუთხეში გააჩერეთ – kutheshi gaacheret).
One day, however, we were given the opportunity to get richer, but it was just a grin of the fate. The director of the Salon of Folk Art, for whom my father worked as an assistant, called me to talk. Surprised by the unusual invitation, I arrived at the Salon.
“I found out that your father-in-law is the director of a plant in Moscow,” he said, “I offer you a profitable combination. It’s time for me to change my Volga – GAZ-24 for a brand new one, but I don’t want it to be conspicuous. So I need a car exactly the same color as mine – gray,” and he wrote the paint code on a piece of paper.
I listened carefully to his proposal.
“The state (official) price of the car is twelve thousand rubles, and the black market price is forty-eight. I’ll give you forty-five, I need to make a profit. And most importantly, I trust you, so there is no need to transfer the car into my name. All your father-in-law needs to do is to buy a car in his daughter’s name, and she will issue me a power of attorney. And we’ll re-register everything later, in two or three years.
The plan was interesting. I promised to find out the possibilities, told everything to my father-in-law and invited him to split the profit in half.
Crap! I made the mistake of using the perverse word “profit.” Osip Yuryevich was scared and beaten by life. He was frightened by the Soviet authorities, who were chasing his businessman dad, and beaten by the accident happened at a construction of a railway.
He was once a very promising mechanical builder and was quickly promoted. A young lieutenant colonel as chief engineer was building a bridge in Siberia. The Communist party demanded that the work would be completed by the holiday of the Revolution, and in order to meet the deadline, the supports of the middle span of the bridge was made not of reinforced concrete, but of metal. They passed the tests perfectly, and the loaded trains started moving. Everyone was awarded and nominated for promotion, the chief engineer was made deputy chief. Now it was possible, without haste, to replace the supports with reinforced concrete ones.
After the tough work, the head of the military unit went to rest, Osip temporarily acted as chief, and the new chief engineer began to replace the supports, but in order to do it slowly, gradually, he overdid it with the speed of work, and the weakened section of the bridge collapsed along with the load on it. Fortunately, no one died. The chief engineer was dismissed, and a lieutenant colonel from the “active army” was exiled as the director of a military facility in Ukraine. The work has become calmer and less promising…
Of course, against the backdrop of such drama, the story with the car looked like a joke! I hadn’t think of presenting the matter in such a way that the sedan Volga was my dream, that I had collected almost twelve thousand and was asking for his help. Probably, by adding two hundred rubles to me, my father-in-law would believe that he was fulfilling his son-in-law’s cherished wish, and in that case, something might work out. But when the colonel heard how much money was circulating here, he got scared. He was especially alarmed by the request for a gray color, and he flatly refused.
What to do? Transporting furniture sets to generals and their families in military trains along with parts for missiles was called a “duty of service”, and enjoying the benefits for one’s family and loved ones was “bourgeois morality”, unworthy of a Soviet man and a communist.
Alas, although I was not a communist, I regretted that I approached the matter honestly, in a communist way. So the result was the same as with communism that we were promised back in the sixties and which we never ever saw…
Summer was approaching – a time for relaxation, and we thought about the sea.
Firstly, we went to Baku. We stayed at my friend Bertie, whom I met or better to say regain acquaintance at Physicist Day, and then attended his wedding. Lilya became friends with his wife Elya, they really liked each other, and Elya revealed to her the secret of wonderful nut baklava, which became the pride of our family too. Together we went to the coast of the Caspian warm and slightly salty sea. We visited my pregnant cousins, Uncle Abel’s daughters and Belka-Strelka, who already had a new husband and two sons. But the trip to Baku was not a real seaside holiday, it was a date with my youth.
In my completely free month August, we set our sights on Sukhumi when a new unusual opportunity arose.
The Medical Institute had its own student camp in Ureki, famous for its black magnetic sand. These properties of sand attracted patients with bone and heart diseases there, but we were attracted by cheap trips for students. For seventeen rubles per person you could live and eat for twenty days. At first I was suspicious of this prospect, but the physical education teacher Mukulaev praised the camp, saying that even the teachers relax there, they feed well and… most importantly, he will arrange for my wife and me to live in a separate cottage. In a word, I was tempted, and we went for the second term in August, after finishing my classes with penguins (applicants).
We arrived at the camp at night and learned that Mukulaev had gotten into a fight with the locals, his skull was broken, and he was evacuated by helicopter to Tbilisi for treatment. Nobody knew us and couldn’t place us together. We refused to go to the rooms for boys and girls to spend the night, so as not to create a precedent, and we were temporarily placed in the first-aid post for the night.
In the morning I met with the camp director, who found my name on the lists, but there was no talk of any teachers’ cottage. Okay, then I gave him fifty rubles and got a separate room. Apparently this room used to serve as the veranda of another room, since half the wall in it was glazed, and from the outside there was a wooden staircase to the second floor. We had to make homemade curtains and glue paper at the windows’ glass.
The food in the camp canteen was passable, but, of course, no teachers or management ate there. Everyone who lived in the cottages had kitchens and cooked themselves. It was very boring on the beach, the students I knew had already left, and there were quite a lot respectable but unknown people there. I was leafing through an anatomy textbook when a man in knee-length shorts noticed this.
“Who are you?” he asked and amazed at my answer, “Our student?! For the first time in my life I see a student with an anatomy textbook on the beach. I have no doubt that you will pass the exam this winter with an excellent score! I am the Head of Anatomy Department. If problems arise, come and remind me where we met, and they will disappear at once!”
I have few memories of the camp. I remember how the patient with a heart problems sank, and rescuers pumped him out, and doctors and students huddled around and discussed how to do it better, but it was too late…
I remember how there was no hot water in the camp, and we went to a rural bathhouse, which turned out to be three log cabins, each of which allowed two people, regardless of gender.
And I also remember how the weather turned bad and it began to rain, lingered for many days in the subtropical zone of Adjara. And then I saw an intercity bus.
“Where to?”
“We’ll leave for Batumi, to the bus station, in half an hour.”
I burst into our gallery, where Lilya was reading a book,
“We’re leaving in twenty minutes, pack!”
We threw our things into our suitcase, warned the director that we were checking out, and managed to jump on the bus just before departure. The road led to Batumi, and from there a direct flight north, to my beloved Sukhumi to Medicine Beach with its composers, physicists and friends and even relatives. Well, I was once again convinced that the quality matches the price…
September brought good news – Lilya began to work and gradually get rid of her confinement in the “grandmother’s dugout,” as we called our wretched refuge. It was time for me to seriously look for housing. I visited the addresses and looked at the apartments on offer. We had to balance between distance from the center and price. Unexpectedly, when I followed an advertisement in a good area, I discovered that the owner was a smart guy I knew since school, a PhD. He was delighted at the opportunity to rent out an apartment to a friend, invited me to the table, took out cognac, and we drank to the meeting, to our families, to the new neighborhood. I refused the fourth toast.
“Why?” asked the owner, “Aren’t you healthy?”
“Yes, I just don’t want to cross the line when my consciousness begins to cloud.”
“You don’t understand the most important thing,” my friend objected, sipping cognac. “You have to make an effort and jump over this line, and beyond it is a magical land,” and he drained the glass to the bottom with undisguised pleasure, “If you live here, I’ll teach you!”
I didn’t rent this apartment. I don’t know what made him an alcoholic, but that prospect didn’t interest me.
The apartment was found, as usual, right under our noses, around the corner from my mother and sister, right opposite the house where my dad grew up, where since my childhood I visited my grandfather David and my grandmother Olga, and then my aunt Leah and my uncle Zhorik.
The owner, Madeleine, a well-known speculator in the area, had a free one-room apartment with amenities on the second floor of the house she owned. Although putting the apartment in order and cleaning out the dirt, especially from the kitchen stove, required extraordinary effort, Lilya and I were happy! We even had a bathroom, unlike our old house.
“These children are bitches!” Madeleine said, “They just constantly asking for new furniture and new clothes. How about making money? By the way, you go back and forth to Moscow, you could bring me products for business, and I would pay well!”
We only lacked transporting products for speculation. Maybe Madeleine called us with her favorite word, bitches, in her heart, but we refused to participate in her business. All the furniture in the apartment was old, mostly from Madeleine. The large wardrobe was inherited from Lilya’s grandmother, who matched me with her granddaughter. The only new ones were Yugoslav chairs with soft seats, the wedding gift from my friends from the Polytechnic Institution.
We have already celebrated the New Year in a rented apartment. Lilya mastered Georgian cuisine and cooking. She spent the entire evening at the stove, preparing a dish of giblets and baking a raisin muffin. But the cake, alas, did not rise and turned out to be damp inside. “Throw it in the trash!” the wife instructed me and collapsed to sleep from fatigue.
And I stayed to cram anatomy in the kitchen. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away a bunch of delicious swollen raisins. Gradually I picked at the whole pie, like an anatomical specimen, and ate the raisins. The next morning I was awakened by Lilya’s heart-rending scream,
“Rats!”
She stood on a chair and pointed towards the kitchen table. I looked in the direction of her finger, but saw nothing but crumbled dough.
“Where are the rats?” I asked.
“On the table. They gnawed the whole pie.”
Then I started laughing,
“That was me who gnawed away the pie and picked out all the raisins!”
At first with disbelief, and then more and more calming down, Lilya went to the kitchen to check her second product – offal with spices. But the smell of boiled offal seemed very disgusting to her. I checked – nothing.
“Come on again,” I asked.
Lilya obeyed, sniffed… and then she puked. You probably already guessed – we had a new addition waiting for us!
And our Muscovites, father-in-law and mother-in-law, increased their pressure on Lilya. They had previously reproached their daughter that, having been discharged, she had reduced the population density in the apartment, and their chances of getting larger living space (that is, a larger apartment) had dropped sharply, although how could Lilya start working without registration? And now there will be a child…
“OK!” we decided, we will get a fictitious divorce while the pregnancy is not visible, and the daughter will “return” to her parents’ apartment. The divorce was easy and quick, and Lilya flew to Moscow to again receive her almost-lost Moscow registration. On the one hand, her parents were happy, but on the other hand, the easy divorce alarmed them. My father-in-law colonel Joseph Malinik tried to find out if this whole operation was directed against his daughter. What if this “Georgian”, who so easily spits on our Soviet laws, is just waiting to abandon his silly pregnant daughter?! And there are not even any witnesses! At Lilya’s work, of course, no one should have known that she got divorced and changed her city of residence! Sure! We had not enough this yet!
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